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Originally Posted by avar
I think there are statements of Tolkien that should be interpreted exactly like this - that the Lord of the Rings is a translation/adaptaion of (parts of) the Red Book, a fictional work mentioned in the text. The difference in tone between the Hobbit and LotR, for instance, is due to Bilbo being responsible for the former.
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Yes, this is correct. The Red Book of Westmarch, is, as I understand it, that copy of the memoirs of Bilbo, Frodo and Sam that is kept by Sam's family for generations at Undertowers in the Fourth Age. - but it is only one copy of several that were made.
In order to flesh out Brljak's thesis a little more I'll quote a couple of passages. Here he makes the point that 'depth' is created by Tolkien's style, and thereby a sense of "reality" is created.
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The vistas remained in background, unexplained and unattainable, but depicted against such a background, the foreground could jump off the page, immersing its reader in a fantastic world realized with an unprecedented "reality" or "depth".
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He then sums up what he calls the "dominant view":
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...according to...[Shippey, Flieger et al.] the metafictional element...is important, but primarily as a frame, validating and authenticating the frame by producing the quality one may refer to as verisimilitude, depth, credibility and so forth.
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Brljak then goes on to challenge this view, and reading about his ideas here prompted me to create this thread, because they genuinely challenge a 'consensus' that has developed in Tolkien studies in a very fascinating way:
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In the midst of great adventure the reader, especially a careless one, is prone to submit to the illusion: after all, a good tale is supposed to "take us there". But the pseudophilological metafictional interface fulfills a task which is equally, if not more important - the task of dragging us back again, back to the "here", into the poignant awareness of the distance, of the chain of mediations stretching across an immense span of time and through the hands of various intermediaries. Tolkien's mature fiction is centrally concerned precisely with this inability of the text to ever take us to that vanished, irretrievable "there", from which even living memory was but the first remove.
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